


Waterfall

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: But I figured I should tag it in case, Canon Compliant, Class 3 E (Assassination Classroom), Distress, Don't Skip Class Guys, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, It's Karma's first assassination attempt, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Skipping Class, calm, nothing new, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 03:45:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21206852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: “This place,” Karma says, swinging himself up on a branch with an enviable effortless. Itona winces.Written for handy-dandy-headcanons's rarepair week on tumblr!





	Waterfall

**Author's Note:**

> This is such a long fic.
> 
> You know how it goes. Rarepair week [here](https://handy-dandy-headcanons.tumblr.com/post/187052555016/rules-the-banned-ships-are-given-due-to-how), join me! Write/draw/read weird crackships, show the other artists/writers some appreciation!! Day 4: Calm/Distress

They don’t talk much, Itona and Karma. 

Their friendship, if it could even be called as such, was based off and maintained with silent companionship; Itona doesn’t have anything to say most of the time, and Karma was surprisingly introspective. (You wouldn’t expect it, not with his devil-may-care attitude and the way he seems to handle what life throws at him with reckless abandon, but he’s one of the smartest people Itona knows and he’d firsthand experienced the brunt of Karma’s strategic intelligence.) 

Koro-sensei watches them with what can only be described as mild disapproval and fond amusement, with the unlikely bond they’ve formed and their tendencies to skip out on classes together. Karma teases him about his inability to read social cues but that’s not true, Itona knows how to read Koro-sensei despite the ever-frozen grin on his face, that must count for something, right? He says that much to Karma, who laughs in his face and says that Koro-sensei’s as easy to read as an open book and anyone in class could interpret his expressions.

Itona doesn’t have a witty reply to that. “Terasaka can’t read,” he says lamely. It makes Karma laugh anyways.

Itona remembers his first interaction with Karma. He feels a little embarrassed thinking about it now, whatever possessed him to pat Karma on the head he didn’t know. Surely Shiro’s influence didn’t go  _ that _ far, and that was hardly appropriate! And to accompany the awkward gesture with such tacky words, about Karma being the strongest in class? Granted, he still thought they were true, but he maybe sees what Karma means about his low EQ.

He does apologize once, so softly that he wishes Karma didn’t hear him. It makes Karma pause in his quiet commentary on the scenery (the mountains that 3-E rest on are beautiful, what a shame that they’re in class too often to appreciate it.) and looks at Itona with a strange look in his eyes, then (rather mockingly) pats Itona on the head twice. 

Itona balks. “I-”

“There, now we’re even,” Karma says with a smug flourish. Itona glares at him. 

Maybe he shouldn’t have apologized at all, Karma clearly didn’t take it to heart - no, no, Karma only seemed like that, like he doesn’t care a single bit about a thing, effortlessly breezing over their heads. But Itona knows what that’s like, he’d been drugged up on that once, the adrenaline of power and emotion and -

He’d turned to Karma at the announcement of their results, at the twelfth place result slip the boy held. It would have been a stunning achievement for anyone else in their class but Itona feels it, the rage and embarrassment radiating off Karma, and he almost feels a little sympathetic at the teasing Koro-sensei regales him with. 

It’s not an opinion he voices. He doesn’t want anyone’s pity, and he’s sure Karma’s the same way. They skip class together later that week and they don’t talk about their results or Asano’s peace treaty, and Karma swings his legs over the air from where he’s seated on the tree branches.

Itona had heard a story about Karma’s last-ditch assassination attempt against Koro-sensei. He hadn’t asked about it, yet, he’s not sure if it was appropriately weighted for their current relationship. Itona does think about these things, okay, on breaching boundaries on social constructs. He’s just not very good at it.

“Aren’t you scared of falling?”

“Hm?” Karma looks down at the ten feet drop between him and the forest floor. “Nah.” 

Itona glances down, then back up at Karma. A slow grin is spreading across his face. 

“Are you scared, Itona?” He asks, voice curling at the edges. 

“Only a sane person would be instinctively wary of heights,” Itona says defensively. He holds on a little tighter to his branch.

“Only if you think about it,” Karma says flippantly. He stands up on the branch, using one overhead as a handhold. Itona’s breath catches in his throat as he watches Karma swing himself into the… abyss was a rather dramatic word, and it’s not a high fall, but it’s still rather jarring to watch.

“These branches support my weight just fine,” Karma says. He pulls himself up on a higher branch, and Itona watches him scale the tree, until Karma’s voice grows fainter and fainter and Itona momentarily panics that he’s going to get left behind. He quickly pulls himself up.

“Test your weight on each branch,” Karma is saying, when Itona is catching up to his voice. “You need contingencies, Itona.”

“Is that what you call them,” Itona mutters. He’s thinking about the assassination attempt again, and he tries not to picture Karma leaping off the branches with that stupid grin on his face, like he’s courting death. What contingencies did he possibly have for that? It was a cliff, and according to Nagisa a completely spontaneous decision. 

“Steady,” Karma says. He has a hand wrapped around Itona’s wrist, his palm inches away from a trail of ants, and Itona blinks up at him. 

Karma raises an eyebrow at him. 

“Shut up, you were distracting me,” Itona snaps.

“Was I?” Karma says. 

Yes. Itona huffs and doesn’t reply. 

Karma’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “Let’s go back. Bitch-sensei’s class is about to start soon.”

“You don’t need her lessons.”

“ _ But you do _ ,” Karma sings in english, rather obnoxiously.

Itona scowls at him. “I understood that.”

Karma says another string of words in complete gibberish. Itona scowls harder.

“Come on,” Karma says again. 

The first time they skipped class together, Itona had asked Karma to bring him to his favourite spot. They’d ended up at the edge of the waterfall where Itona had waged a battle with Koro-sensei and the class, and Itona was sure Karma had been mocking him. 

“This place,” Karma says, swinging himself up on a branch with an enviable effortless. Itona winces. 

“Nice, isn’t it?” Karma says, all sharp teeth.

Itona eyes the water. He doesn’t have tentacles anymore, but he absently touches the headband, and when he looks back up he sees Karma staring at him with an inscrutable look in his eyes. He gets to his feet and motions for Itona to follow. 

They end up at a cliff, overlooking a denser part of the forest a little bit of the city down aways from the hill, and Karma stretches languidly on the edge of the cliff and pats the grass next to him. Itona warily sits. 

“I come here, sometimes,” Karma says.

Itona doesn’t get it. He feels like there’s some sort of significance, then, why they’d gone from that waterfall to this cliff. It didn’t quite feel like Karma was trying to make fun of him, but he doesn’t say anything. 

“I like the view,” Karma tells him, “it’s beautiful, when you make peace with it.”

Itona only learns about Karma’s apparent suicide attempt a week later when Terasaka tells him about it. He goes back to the cliff on his own, retracing his steps, and sits and looks at the view, and imagines Karma leaping off it, pistol cocked in his hands, eyes wild and hair whipping in the wind.

Karma doesn’t bring him back to the waterfall, or the cliff. They go elsewhere the next few times, like Koro-sensei’s pool or their training grounds or even in a little cave up north that Karma found. Itona feels a little like a child, following on Karma’s heels as he leads him through like a video game walkthrough. 

It’s weird, because Itona doesn’t understand his relationship with Karma, but he likes it. 

“You two should stop skipping class,” Koro-sensei chastises, when Karma bounds into class with a cheerful wave and greets Koro-sensei with a throwing knife. Itona walks in after him, hands in his pockets.

“But Sensei,” Karma groans theatrically, but it’s clear he has nothing to conclude with. Itona shrugs, because neither does he. 

Bitch-sensei walks in, yawning. “It’s too early for class,” she says, all dramatic. Karma snickers.

“It’s past noon,” Koro-sensei says.

“No one asked you, damn octopus,” Bitch-sensei says. “Today we’ll be learning how to say ‘I want to take a nap’ and ‘I need better sleeping habits’ in 10 different languages. Extra credit if you learn ‘I want coffee’.”

A hand shoots out. “What are the real-life applications for these questions?”

“Chatting up strangers,” she says immediately, which is complete bullshit but also oddly smart. “Exhaustion is a universal human experience and everybody likes talking about how much sleep they didn’t get last night. Next question.”

The class explodes into a flurry of exclamations that Bitch-sensei wearily addresses, and eventually she straightens up and points one end of a ruler at Karma. “You, english, french, chinese, go.”

Karma rattles off the phrases in what Itona can only assume to be fluent when Bitch-sensei nods her head in satisfaction and moves on to her next victim - Sugino, who stumbles over his spanish. Karma sits back with a self-assured smirk. 

“Itona!” Bitch-sensei barks. “Stop staring at Karma, I know he’s cute.”

His classmates are snickering. Itona crosses his arms. “I wasn’t staring,” he protests hotly.

“Uh huh, and I’m sure you were just paying attention to his pronunciation,” she says. “Go on then, english, french, chinese.”

Itona rattles out the phrases in english with he scarcely knows, and one of Shiro’s scientists had been french and had always lamented about, coincidentally, his lack of sleep. Perhaps Bitch-sensei was right about human predictability and common conversational topics. He falters at chinese, and just stares blankly. 

“Fine, sit down,” she says, corrects his English a bit, and moves on to someone else. 

“I didn’t know you could speak french,” Karma says to him the next time they’re strolling through the forest.

“I can’t,” Itona says, “that was - that was barely any french.”

“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit,” Karma tells him.

Nothing else is said of it. The rest of their time is spent in silence, punctuated by the liveliness of the animals. Itona crunches some leaves underneath his heel and picks up a flat rock that fits nicely against his palm, and he watches Karma watch the birds flit around in the canopy. 

The third time he goes back to the waterfall, Itona’s nervous. He’s alone, and he lets himself be nervous, stepping over rocks with an unsteady gait and watching water rush around crevices and splash over his shoes. He no longer has the tentacles, and he’s perfectly capable of swimming, but there’s still an unease settled around his shoulders like a blanket. 

He doesn't stay very long. 

"Can I ask you something," he asks Karma, who hums an affirmative whilst partly distracted by his book of… college statistics. Karma's eyes flick up to look at him.

"How long did it take for you to… find peace?"

The book gets set aside. Itona inexplicably feels more vulnerable.

"I'm still working on it," Karma admits softly, curling a fist in his lap, and Itona itches to grab it. 

"People make peace with their things in different ways," Karma says. He smiles at Itona, then, and he sees the sun. "You being there with me, it helped."

Itona wonders what that means. He goes back to Karma's cliff the day after, feeling grass under his bare feet and watching Karma's imagined figure twist and leap off the edge.

Karma's fine. He's fine. Koro-sensei caught him.

He still peers over the edge on his knees, hands tugging at the grass, and feeling wind whip in his face. How scary must that have felt?

Bitch-sensei is grading papers when he finds her. Or, well, she's doodling in red pen on what seems to be Isogai's worksheet. "Hey little Itona," she greets, before Itona opens his mouth. "How's Karma?"

"I don't," Itona says, brows furrowed. "Huh?"

Bitch-sensei flashes him a grin - mischievous, fleeting. Itona starts to regret his decision a little - she was the most fitting, Itona thinks, to talk about these things, but Bitch-sensei was Bitch-sensei after all, and she was a wild card at best and a real, um, nevermind. But he was here already, so.

"Uh, sensei-"

"You can just call me Irina," she says, swivelling her chair around to face him. "Ah, it's happened."

"Huh?"

"The onset of the whole," she waves a hand absently, "ptsd."

Itona shifts. "I don't have ptsd," he says, rubbing his arm absently.

“Of course you do,” Bitch-sensei says easily, waving a hand like it’s nothing. “Everyone of you kids do. I kind of pity you lot.”

Itone blinks. “I-”

“Have you been to the cultural festival yet?” She interrupts.

“It’s not for another two months,” Itona says.

“If you’ve been before,” Bitch-sensei says, “you’ll never experience it the same way again.”

Itona finally understands what she means, standing in the field with 3-E up on a hill, chatting quietly. They hear the crack before they see it, instantly they’re up on their feet, pistols with rubber bullets trained in the shadows and tensed up with shallow breathing, and Itona runs through the long list of people who have tried to take their lives this far-

-and the sky explodes into brilliant color, red and yellows and oranges. Very silently, Katoka lowers her gun.

“Maybe you’ll never make peace with it,” Bitch-sensei tells him, swirling a water bottle like it’s a glass of wine. “Maybe you’ll always hear gunshots when balloons pop, maybe you’ll never trust a hospital bed again - I know I can’t, don’t go around telling people that,” she winks at him. “Maybe you’ll always look at the waterfall and remember nothing but pain.”

Itona inhales sharply. How-

“Or,” she says, “maybe you won’t. I can’t promise you that it’d get better if you stick it out,” she says, “but I can promise you that it won’t if you don’t.” Bitch-sensei pauses, as if considering.

“Word of advice, Itona?”

“Huh?”

“Sexuality,” she says. “Funny thing. Doesn’t always have to make sense. If you’ve been poked and prodded all over you never really,” she makes an aborted hand gesture, and Itona flushes. “It’s fine, you’re fine. You’ll be fine. Okay?”

“Yes sensei,” Itona says softly. 

“Good, now scram. Don’t tell the rest of the brats that I’m being soft or anything, they might think I actually like them.”

Itona snorts softly. “Sure,” he says.

He goes back to the waterfall for the fourth time two days after the cultural festival, gunshots still ringing in his ears. The rushing water thunders in counter, and Itona slowly scales the rocks until he's standing ankle deep in the stream.

It's not scary. He's not scared. Itona can swim. He was never scared of this place, just uncomfortable, because it reminded him of…

...failure. And when he was pitted against the friends he appreciated so much now. It's not physical pain that fills his chest, but shame. He'd hurt them, he thinks, he'd hurt 3-E. That made him a bad person, in a way, 

They say he's part of the class now, and he does feel it, but sometimes…

...he feels... 

He feels regret, Itona thinks. This waterfall is tainted with regret. 

Not just for going against 3-E, but for joining Shiro, for leaving his life behind, for being a puppet. It’s the shame, and he feels it wash over him like the water on the rocks, wearing him down, down, down. 

This place, Itona thinks, was a reminder of his failure. How he had within his reach a way to get out, Terasaka with his hand outstretched, Koro-sensei offering a place in his classroom, everyone else looking at him expectantly, and he went back to Shiro.

“Timing,” Karma says, when they’re watching a kingfisher stare at the water, perched on a branch. 

“Huh?” Itona says. 

“Shush," Karma says, a grin playing at his lips like he wasn't the one that started this conversation. They watch the kingfisher dip low and enter the water with a splash, then pop out of it with a fish in it's mouth. Itona finds himself smiling.

Timing, he thinks, mattered. Too early or too late and the kingfisher wouldn't have caught his prize. 

Itona was horrible at timing. He said the wrong words and did the wrong things more often than not, and his classmates found his bluntness hilarious, but Itona thought it was mildly frustrating.

But as he wades through the water in the stream below the waterfall, pants rolled up to his calves, he wonders how different things would have gone for him if he was in a different place at a different time. 

Maybe Shiro wouldn't have found him and exploited his weaknesses, but then maybe Itona would have given up. He wouldn't have met 3-E or Koro-sensei or Terasaka or Karma.

Maybe he could have taken up Koro-sensei's offer and joined the class when he was cornered by his then-future classmates, but then he wouldn't have had been abandoned by Shiro or snapped and fully come to terms with the abuse he'd suffered.

Maybe Itona was going about this the wrong way. He wasn't scared of water nor the symbolism of it. He was ashamed, yes, and regretful, but that wasn't going to go away. He won't stop regretting having ever made his decisions, but any other way wouldn't have brought him here, so he appreciated them.

What had Bitch-sensei said? It was okay to never be as okay as he hoped to be. None of 3-E were coming out of this unscathed, Itona doesn't have to expect to.

"Let's go somewhere," Itona says, when Karma's idly twisting a leaf off a branch. They walk twists and trails in silence the way they always do, and Itona glances over to watch Karma raise his eyebrows in mild surprise as they come on the clearing of the waterfall. 

"You said being with me helped you," Itona says. "So you're here with me."

"I might have suggested it beforehand," Karma says, "but I wasn't sure if you would be ready." He joins Itona in the shallow water, ripples lapping at their ankles. 

"I've been here a few times," Itona says. He picks up a flat rock and examines it in his palm. Karma selects a boulder to sit on, and beckons Itona over. He sits next to him, and Karma leans back a little, looking at the sky. 

“Have you made peace with it?” Karma asks.

“No,” Itona says. “That’s okay, though.”

“Is it?” Karma says.

“I regret it,” Itona says, “and I don’t think I’ll ever stop regretting it, except that if I hadn’t done all the things I’ve done, I wouldn’t be here with you, so I think I kind of liked the way things turned out.”

Karma laughs, like twinkling lights and bells. “I get that,” he says. 

Itona thinks about something else Bitch-sensei had told him, about… sexuality. He looks at Karma, head tilted to the sky, golden shining in his hair, and then back down at the rock in his palm. 

Maybe next time. 

**Author's Note:**

> Can you tell I am KILLING myself over rarepairs, crackships, and the unholy ridiculous trio of Gakushuu Irina Itona I made for myself??? It's not going to happen but I lOvE tHeM


End file.
